The Children’s Health Exposure Analysis Resource, or CHEAR, is a program funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to advance understanding about how the environment impacts children’s health and development over the course of a lifetime. CHEAR provides researchers interested in linking early life exposures to health outcomes access to laboratory analysis of environmental exposures and data analysis consultation at no cost to the investigator.

CHEAR is designed to expand the range of environmental exposures assessed in NIH-funded children’s health studies, including:

Studies wishing to expand their analysis to include environmental exposure analysis or assessments of interactions between genes and the environment

Studies that have collected environmental exposure data but seek more extensive analysis

Exposures measured by CHEAR will cover the breadth of the “exposome,” which encompasses all environmental exposures including chemical, physical, and biological stressors, as well as lifestyle and social environments, from conception through adolescence. Only exposures that can be measured through laboratory analysis of human samples will be addressed.

CHEAR Moving Forward

New requests for CHEAR services are no longer being accepted.

CHEAR was launched in 2015 to provide access to an infrastructure for adding comprehensive exposure analysis of biological sample to existing studies of children’s health. In 2019 NIEHS will establish a new infrastructure, the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR) as a continuation of CHEAR. The scope of HHEAR will expand to include environmental exposures and health outcomes at all life stages. In addition ...[more]